


Call to the Light

by rosweldrmr



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-13
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-20 01:15:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5987230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosweldrmr/pseuds/rosweldrmr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey tears into his mind. She shoves aside the images of children lying at his feet with a kind of cold precision he had not thought her capable of. She’s stronger than he anticipated, and she will not leave empty handed. | Rey interrogates Kylo Ren</p>
            </blockquote>





	Call to the Light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [on_my_toes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/on_my_toes/gifts).



> This gift is for [heyloreylo](http://heyloreylo.tumblr.com) who requested: "I enjoy angst and fluff and there's really nothing I don't like. I am Reylo trash, bring it on y'all"
> 
> Fic title take from [this](http://arriku.tumblr.com/post/136374650422/) artwork by [arriku](http://arriku.tumblr.com) and plot of this fic was heavily influenced by [vforvogus](http://vforvogus.tumblr.com)'s comic [Star Wars: The New Force](http://vforvogus.tumblr.com/search/Star%20Wars%20:%20The%20New%20Force%22).

“And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language.” — Hanif Kureishi

\--

“You will never break me,” he hisses and pulls against the restraints that bind him.

“We’ll just see about that,” she threatens, her hand held up, directing the Force within him to yield to her. He can feel it; that clawing, grating sensation of her power worming its way inside of him. She’s looking for something. But he is prepared for this, for the intrusion of her mind in his. He’s felt it before.

He deflects, allows his mind to wander to the darkest of his memories.

“No!” she jerks back at the first scream of a child.

“What’s wrong, _scavenger_? Not strong enough?” he taunts.

Her rage seems to strengthen her power, and with the next attack on his mind, he feels his hold of the memory slip.

“Ben, help!” a boy screams.

“No more!” Rey insists and tears into his mind. She shoves aside the images of children lying at his feet with a kind of cold precision he had not thought her capable of. She’s stronger than he anticipated, and she will not leave empty handed.

 _“You’re a monster,”_ she’d said that night she slashed his face open. And suddenly, he finds himself in the snow, watching the echo of himself crawl on his hands and knees. He leaves a bloody path to the edge of the ravine. All around him, the planet shakes in the throes of its death.

“No!” Kylo commands his mind, snaps his thoughts far from that night.

Rey is standing next to him on a forest world. The moons are bright and hang low over the horizon.

“There is a darkness in him,” his mother says to his father.

“There’s too much Vader in him,” his father says and turns away.

“You think this is my fault?” his mother asks, wiping the tears from her cheeks.

“It’s no one’s fault,” his father lies. His mother doesn’t believe him either. Kylo spies on his parents through his mother’s Force-connection. Even eight systems away, he finds the signature of her easily.

“Show me,” Rey interrupts the memory, letting it melt away like snow in the sun. Even now, trudging through the dark recesses of his mind, she is so close to uncovering what she came for.

Kylo already knows what she wants. He fights against her. He will _not_ let her have this.

“Show me,” she whispers. Her hand is soft on his face as she rises up on her tip-toes.

He kisses her. Sweetly, softly. It feels wrong. He should not want this. He should not want her like this. He tries to take control, to back her into a wall and take and take and take.

“ _You know I can take whatever I want,_ ” he’d said the first time. When he dared to invade her mind, when he still thought he was powerful enough to overcome her. But she’d slipped into his mind so effortlessly. Without training, without knowing the first thing about the Force, she was able to see so deeply inside of him.

He pushes her away, keeps her at arm’s length. She is dangerous.

“Show me, Kylo.”

She crowds into the space between dreams and memories, picking at the hidden parts of his mind. She is slowing taking him apart. Piece by piece, she dismantles all his defenses.

“Please,” he begs the ghost of his grandfather. “Show me the way.”

“He doesn’t speak to you, does he?” she asks, independent of the war raging inside his mind. She speaks to him now from the physical world, where he is strapped to an interrogation chair and behind a mirror his mother watches through.

“He’s spoken to me all my life! Shown me things you can’t imagine!” He fights back, straining against her presence in his mind. She is so strong though. Too strong. He will not be able to resist much longer.

“You know that’s a lie,” she accuses and he can feel the truth of it well up inside him. That fear he’s harbored since he was a boy. The lie of it. His grandfather has never spoken to him, never shown him the darkness. It was only ever an illusion. He was just too weak to see it.

“Snoke,” he whispers and retreats into himself, trying to pull away from her. He pulls his thoughts inward, hides in the dark like a lost child.

“He told me to stop you,” she calls in the dark. She’s looking for him, trying to find him.

“You’re lying!” he screams and swings his lightsaber, drawing red lines in the dark.

“Am I?” she whispers. She’s right behind him now. “It’s over,” she says softly, touching his back. “There’s nothing for you to complete. You can stop now.”

“No.” He shakes his head and tries to run, but his feet won’t move. “It can’t have been for nothing. It can’t.”

“Kylo,” Rey speaks his name so sweetly he thinks it's almost like love. He feels the walls of his mind warp around him, bend and crack and shift as she pushes on him like the tides breaking against a sea wall. She is wearing him down.

“Mother,” he begs back in the real world; his tears are salty against the chapped skin of his lips. “Please, make her stop.”

“Rey--” his mother’s voice cuts in over the intercom.

“Please, General. Just a little more!” Rey argues, and he can hear the fatigue in her voice.

“Don’t,” he begs her. He begs her with words and thoughts and Force. He lays himself bare before her; he is on his knees in the mud, blood on his hands, Knights of Ren at his back. He clasps his hands and looks up at her. Her face is cast in a blue light. Lightning that will not fade. The rain is cold against his skin. “Don’t make me,” he begs her. She is so close now, so close to pulling him apart.

She holds the thread of what she seeks in her hand. A red string that leads directly to the heart of him. She has only but to pull. And he begs her not to. He is desperate now. He grabs at her robes, crawls on his knees to the edge of the ravine. His blood freezes in the snow.

“How is this better?” he screams into the void. His lightsaber flickers out as he looks down into the fiery core of the dying planet. “I’m coming,” he whispers before he closes his eyes and tips forward. “Father,” he sobs as he falls as bonelessly as a corpse, “I’m coming.”

“No!” Rey screams and lunges for him. She catches his wrist and slams into the snow-covered ground. She is the only thing stopping him from falling. “You didn’t jump,” she insists.

“Snoke,” Kylo rasps out in answer. He’d been the one to stop him that night. He is coughing up blood. “Hux.” He nods over her shoulder. She watches as the ghost of his memory plays out. Hux hauls him up, over the side of the rift.

“Supreme leader Snoke is not done with you yet, Ren,” Hux threatens as he loads him on a ship.

“No,” Rey whispers brokenly as she shakes her head and takes a step backwards.

“Don’t make me,” he begs her again. The image of Hux winks out and they are left in darkness. Only the blue light that surrounds Rey is enough to illuminate them. “Please, _Rey_. Mercy. Have mercy.”

“Rey--” his mother’s voice crackles through the room. Kylo tastes blood mixed with his tears. But she is undeterred. She advances on him, a wild, frantic kind of look in her eyes.

“Show me,” she whispers in the room and crawls into the spaces inside him. Those awful places he tries to hide in the dark. The truth of what he is.

There is a light in the darkness. A warm, amber glow that shines like a star in the distance. Rey’s light fades as it grows larger. “Is this what you wanted?” he asks from his knees. “Take it then, take it!” he screams, clawing at his chest, trying to tear it open. “It’s what you came for, isn’t it?”

The light grows brighter and brighter until they both have to shield their eyes from it.

“How?” he hears her call to him. She swings her hands blindly until she’s able to grip his arms. She kneels in front of him. He can feel her knee touch his. He can’t see anything. There is too much light. And she presses her forehead against his. “How is it possible to carry so much light?” she asks, something like wonder caught in her voice.

“It’s not mine,” he confesses. The great shame he’s hidden for years. “A punishment,” he explains, trying to call back the darkness, where it’s safe. He’s too exposed in the light, too vulnerable.

“You’re made of it,” she gasps as the light begins to pulse.

It is a sensation he’s not felt in years. Something he’s spent every day of his life lived as Kylo Ren trying to hide. It’s a shameful thing, to contain so much light. He is tainted. Ruined. “It’s a weakness,” he explains.

“No,” she gasps as the light grows warmer and warmer all around them.

She kisses him again. But this time, it is not an attack. She does not try to draw the light out of him, as before. Now, she shares it with him. The blue light of her Force is cool where the warm amber of his begins to burn. She is trying to save him. Trying to stop him from burning himself to ashes.

“Tell her,” he says, pulling away from the kiss. His eyes are whited out. He reaches out, finds her arms and traces them up to frame her face. “Tell her I’m sorry,” he whispers before he grips her shoulders and _shoves_.

“Ben!” Rey screams his name, but he will not let her burn with him. He pools all the power he has left, all the light he carries within him, and pushes her from his mind.

“You tell her,” he grunts in pain from the interrogation chair. She is gone from his mind, safely back inside herself on some backwater rebel planet, the name of which he will die never knowing. “You tell her,” he says again, grinding his teeth in agony.

“Ben,” she says, her voice breaking. She covers her mouth to stop from sobbing, but he can see the tears that fall from her eyes. He counts each drop before it's too late.

“You owe her that,” he says and rolls his head back.

\--

There is something alive inside him. A flame, a light that’s burning him up. That light that she’s gone looking for. She’d pulled it out of him, dragged him from the darkness kicking and screaming. There was so much of it; too much. She couldn’t fathom how anyone could contain so much of it.

And now she knew. As she watches him burning himself up from the inside, she understands why he’s spent his whole life pushing it away.

Rey watches helplessly as the Force rages like a fire through his soul. She see the light catch in his eyes; it burns a yellow-white until he slumps forward, limp and lifeless. And she swears she can taste ashes on her tongue.

Kylo Ren is gone.

“What have you done!?” Leia screams as she slams the door open. “What have you done!” she screeches and kneels by the body of her son.

“It was too much,” Rey says, shaking her head. “There was too much light. How could he have so much of it inside him?” she asks in a daze. She can still feel the heat of it against her face. She touches her cheeks and feels her hands come away warm. She doesn’t understand. How can someone so dark be _made_ of light? How could it destroy him like that? “I thought light was good.”

“Balance,” Luke says from the doorway. “The key is balance,” he says, with enough wisdom in his voice to silence her.

“I’m sorry,” Rey sobs. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry!”

“What did he say?” Leia asks, tracing the cheek of Kylo’s face with a shaking hand. His scar looks smaller now, for some reason.

“He said he was sorry,” she says softly. She doesn’t know what to do. Where to go. Surely, she should leave them to grieve.

“What a fine mess you’ve made,” Kylo’s ghost whispers in her ear. Rey whips around in a circle, like a dog chasing its tail. He stands in a corner, his arms crossed. His scar is gone, and he wears the same robes Luke prefers. And Rey knows this isn’t Kylo Ren. This is Ben Solo.

“I’m sorry,” she apologizes to the ghost of the man she’s just murdered.

Luke raises an eyebrow at her, but says nothing.

“Tell her it’s not her fault,” his ghost says, that same even voice she learned to hate during her interrogation.

“He says,” Rey starts and stops when Leia turns to look at her. “He says it wasn’t your fault.”

“It wasn’t because she sent me away.”

“It wasn’t because you sent him away,” Rey repeats and watches as Leia practically shatters before her.

“It was my choice.”

“He says it was his choice,” she says softly and feels ashamed to be a part of this conversation.

“The light was always too much. I couldn’t control it. So I pushed it away, hid it in the dark.”

“The light was too much for him. He couldn’t control it. So he pushed it away, tried to hide it in the dark.”

“But it was a part of me. Like she was. Like my father was. I’m sorry I failed her.”

“He’s sorry he failed you. But you were always a part of him, you and…” Rey tries, but her throat closes up. “You and Han. You were always a part of him, just like the light.”

“You tell him,” Leia finally says, turning to face her. “Tell that idiot son of mine that I’m going to find him again someday. And when I do, he’s got a lot to answer for.” She points a finger in the direction of Ben’s ghost.

“Looking forward to it,” Ben smirks and he looks so much like Han that Rey has to look away. “See ya later, scavenger,” he calls before she feels him fade away.

“He said he’s looking forward to it,” Rey barely manages before she has to run from the room. And she knows she will never be the same again. She will never be who she was before. And she thinks, maybe, she could have loved him. Seeing him dressed as a Jedi, that smirk that must have been what Leia fell in love with all those years ago. And now she will never know what he could have been. What they could have been.

**Author's Note:**

> Quick, someone insert the gif of Han saying, "That's not how the force works," for this entire fic. 
> 
> To see all the posts that inspired this fic, you can visit [this tag](Http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/tagged/cttl) on my tumblr.
> 
> Also, the whole concept of Kylo being burned alive by the light inside him was kind of taken from Harry Potter. Where Voldemort might have died if he tried to piece his broken soul back together.


End file.
